Blog Archives

Achieving Maximum SSD Efficiency

Posted on January 25, 2012 by George Crump

There are two well-known facts about solid state disk (SSD). First, SSD is fast and second, SSD is expensive—compared with traditional disk drives. There are also two well-known facts about the data center. First, almost every data center needs more…

Tagged with: Data center, Deduplication, Flash memory, Hard disk drive, RAID, Solid-state drive, SSD
Posted in Article

Integrating PCIe SSD Into The Storage System

Posted on December 6, 2011 by George Crump

The NexGen storage system is designed from the ground up to take advantage of solid state storage and is the first system that we know of that integrates storage tiering from the first release. It is also the first storage…

Tagged with: Hard disk drive, IOPS, NexGen, PCI Express, Solid-state drive
Posted in Blog

OCZ SSD Keeps Shining

Posted on November 17, 2011 by George Crump

This is going to be one of those blog entries where “no news” is “the news.” Storage Switzerland started testing the OCZ Deneva 2 MLC based solid state disk (SSD) drives backup on July 25th and it has been working…

Tagged with: Hard disk drive, OCZ, OCZ Technology, RAID, SSD, Storage
Posted in Lab Report

AKiTio Taurus Super Mini S

Posted on November 15, 2011 by George Crump

A new addition to the Storage Switzerland Lab is the AKiTio Super Mini S. This is a small, somewhat portable dual drive storage device that can either stripe or mirror two 2.5″ hard drives. While some assembly is required I…

Tagged with: Akitio, Backup, Booting, Hard disk drive, IEEE 1394, RAID, Solid-state drive, Standard RAID levels, Test Drive
Posted in Lab Report

High Performance Storage For The Mid-Range

Posted on September 15, 2011 by George Crump

Mid-range data centers have many of the same performance challenges that large enterprises do. As these organizations grow they are virtualizing servers, becoming more reliant on high transaction databases and can have Exchange or Sharepoint performance issues. The problem is…

Tagged with: CASL, ExecEvent, Flash memory, Hard disk drive, Hardware, Nimble, Storage, Technology
Posted in Blog

OCZ Deneva 2 Test Drive – First Impressions

Posted on July 25, 2011 by George Crump

OCZ recently sent Storage Switzerland two of their new Deneva 2 eMLC based solid state disk drives (SSD) to test in our labs. eMLC, or enterprise MLC, has a longer life cycle (about 30,000 program/erase cycles) than MLC without the…

Tagged with: Hard disk drive, HDD, MLC, Multi-level cell, OCZ Technology, Solid-state drive, SSD
Posted in Lab Report

What is Server Based Solid State Caching?

Posted on June 27, 2011 by George Crump

Thanks to virtualization (server and desktop), cloud computing and big data, many environments are adding capacity to their storage infrastructures to meet performance demand. Essentially they are trying to provide the storage system with access to enough hard disk spindles…

Tagged with: Cache, Dell, Hard disk drive, Marvell, NetApp, PCI Express, Solid-state drive, SSD, Storage, Western Digital
Posted in Article

What is LTFS?

Posted on May 18, 2010 by George Crump

Linear Tape File System (LTFS) is IBM’s recently released, self describing tape file system that enables tape media to be mounted and read by the operating system when the cartridge is inserted into the tape drive. The goal is to…

Tagged with: File system, Hard disk drive, IBM, Linear Tape-Open, Linux, LTFS, Tape drive
Posted in Article